35mm Fireworks

OK, a bit of history.. The first set was shot on July 01, 2000, at my neighbor's parent's house. We began lighting the 3 inch artillery shells at dusk, and progressed into the night..

Equipment used: On my 35mm camera, I mounted my 28mm wide-angle lens, set at f-stop 16, film speed of 200, shutter speed set to "B", and used a shutter release cable to fire the shutter. The shutter was held open for 2 seconds up to 30 seconds, which creates the 'tail' on some of the images. Obviously, the camera was mounted on a tripod for stability.

About the jpg's presented here: The original sizes of the jpgs I got back on the cd were huge, 500k jpg's. I cropped them to show just the fireworks, getting rid of all the wasted space around them. Other than cropping them to the sizes here, and adding my copyright information, NONE of the images have had any enhancements done to them. What you see is what I took.

This was my first attempt ever to take photographs of fireworks, and came at a moment's notice. I had planned on doing it this year, but had a couple hours to prepare for it. I did a quick print out of a 'so you want to shoot photo's of fireworks' FAQ, and was consulting that up to the actual time of shooting. I think I did fairly well, considering I used 11 of the 25 shots that came out! And was nice to see that the FAQ I was using was pretty well written. My fear was, these are either gonna be good, or gonna suck big time.

The second set of fireworks photo's were shot June 30, 2001, at the Kalamazoo Speedway, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Not bad for a tripod set up in the stands themselves, I think.

July 01, 2000

Click on thumbnail to see full-sized image.

June 30, 2001, Kalamazoo Speedway, Kalamazoo, Michigan